After a holiday break, AMD’s staggered launch of the Evergreen family picks back up today with the launch of the Radeon HD 5670. The 5670 marks the desktop launch of Redwood, the 3rd chip in the Evergreen family, designed to fit in below the Juniper chip that powers the Radeon HD 5700 series.

ATI Radeon HD 5750

ATI Radeon HD
4850

ATI Radeon HD 4770

ATI Radeon HD
5670

ATI Radeon HD
4670

Stream Processors

720

800

640

400

320

Texture Units

36

40

32

20

32

ROPs

16

16

16

8

8

Core Clock

700MHz

625MHz

750MHz

775MHz

750MHz

Memory Clock

1.15GHz (4.6GHz data rate) GDDR5

993MHz (1986MHz data rate) GDDR3

800MHz (3200MHz data rate) GDDR5

1000MHz (4000MHz data rate) GDDR5

1000MHz (2000MHz data rate) GDDR3

Memory Bus Width

128-bit

256-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

Frame Buffer

1GB / 512MB

1GB / 512MB

512MB

1GB / 512MB

1GB / 512MB

Transistor Count

1.04B

956M

826M

627M

514M

TDP

86W

110W

80W

61W

59W

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 40nm

TSMC 55nm

TSMC 40nm

TSMC 40nm

TSMC 55nm

Price Point

$129 - $149

$99-$129

$129

$99 / $119

$60-$90

AMD has been relatively straightforward in designing the Evergreen family. Each chip is half of its bigger brother. This means that the Redwood chip and the 5670 is in most ways half of a Juniper/5770: half the SIMDs (400), half the ROPs (8), half the texture units (20), etc. The core clocks are also slightly changed compared to the 5870 and 5770; here we have a core clock of 775MHz instead of 850MHz as found on those cards. So on paper, the 5670 is going to be slightly less than half of a 5770 in performance.

The one hardware unit that hasn’t been halved is the memory bus – we still have the same 128-bit GDDR5 memory bus as found on the 5770, but here it’s clocked at a 4GHz data rate. So the 5670 has a higher bandwidth-to-compute ratio than the 5770 does.

In nearly chopping Juniper in half, AMD has brought the transistor count down from 1.04B to 627M. Those transistors occupy a space of 104mm2, which is understandably smaller than the 5770, but also smaller than the RV730 GPU that powers the Radeon HD 4670, the card the 5670 replaces. This smaller die brings load power down to 61W, and idle power down to 14W.

While most of the functional units have been halved, the feature set remains otherwise unchanged from the rest of the 5000 series. DirectX 11, UVD2 video decoding, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing are all accounted for. Eyefinity is also here, using a slightly different port configuration to continue bringing support for 3 monitor Eyefinity.

At $99, the 5670 is intended to stake out the all-important sub-$100 position for video cards, which is a big price point for price-sensitive buyers and OEMs. Bear in mind that the entire sub-$100 market encompassed 2/3rds of all video card sales last quarter, according to AMD and Mercury Research. Given the low transistor count and small die size of the 5670, we expect that AMD will have a lot of price latitude to work with going forward – as 40nm production costs and GDDR5 costs come down, this board should be cheaper to make than the 4670 ever was.

AMD considers the chief competition for this board to be the NVIDIA GeForce GT 240, which we reviewed last week. However this price point also brings AMD into competition with last year’s parts: the GeForce 9800 GT and Radeon 4850. The former is in good supply, and the latter still available enough at this moment to be a viable alternative. As we’ll see, this is by no means a slam-dunk for AMD today.

Coming from CES, we had a chance to talk to vendors about the 40nm TSMC situation, which has been a thorn in AMD’s side since the launch of the 4770 last year. What we’re hearing is that the situation is improving (which is why 5800 series cards are finally usually in stock) but that it’s still not as good as everyone would like. For this launch there are 50k+ cards, which should be more than enough to satisfy demand. We don’t expect there to be any supply issues with the 5670.

Unless you already have an HTPC why would anyone get this card. If building a new HTPC you could get a Clarkdale to bitstream the audio-codecs.

Also...why do we care if it is bitstreamed? I have a reciever that can decode this but it doesn't matter if the digital information is converted to PCM before or after the HDMI cable. The only advantage is to see those lights on the front of my reciever... Reply

The 8800 GT data was originally collected for past articles, where we started at 16x10. The 8800 GT isn't part of my collection (it's Anand's) so I wasn't able to get 12x10 data in time for this article. Reply

It's probably fair to point out that, in most tests, the 5670 is very close to the 8800, and as such listing it may not mean anything. However, the 1280x1024 tests are also without AA - it might be nice to see the effect of turning AA on with this oldie but goodie as compared to the more modern competition, so including it may make sense. You may think that the higher core clock of the 5670 would give it an advantage without AA but if it goes anything like Batman, this would probably be an incorrect assumption as well. Reply

By that definition that means that these cards were designed to run in systems that have power supplies from 350 to 400w, support HD quality video, and support games at a resolution of no higher than 1440x900 at medium quality settings with 2x AA and 8x anisotropic filtering. By putting them at settings that most will not run these cards at it makes these results for the most part worthless.

I mean who cares how these cards run at 1920x1200 at high detail settings since we already know they're going to fail anyway? I'm more interested in how these run with all the details on at say 1440x900 or possibly 1680x1050 which are the more common widescreen monitors most people have.

For that matter where are details about how these cards compare running HD quality video, if the fan speed can be controlled via speedfan, or even if they have fixed some of the video quality issues like black crush when outputting via HDMI?
Reply

We traditionally run every game at 3 resolutions, particularly since some games are more GPU-intensive than others. Based on the 12x10 performance, I decided that 10x7 would be silly and instead went up a level to 19x12 - a few games were actually playable even at those high resolutions.

16x10 is accounted for, and 12x10 is close enough to 14x9 that the results are practically the same.

HD Video: All the 5000 series cards, except perhaps the Cedar are going to be exactly the same.

Fan speed: Can be modified (I use it to cool down the cards before extraction after running FurMark)